Kenneth Goldsmith’s ‘uncreative’ practice is conceptualist, in the sense that it prioritises the ‘what if?’ potential of utopic, avant-garde culture.
The un-creativity of his method is based on lifting whole chunks of extant material then re-contextualizing it in the discourse of another cultural field, be that material language, video, sound files or anything else.
As an author of so-called Conceptual Writing, he would extend this method with an additional gesture of calling the shifted material one’s own. Like Soliloquay (2001) or Seven American Deaths and Disasters (2013) or Capital 2015).
This additional, authorial gesture makes his artistic application of the method very different politically (if not procedurally) from his archiving work. What binds the two sides of Goldsmith’s uncreative practice is overtly signalled by his archive’s URL: ubu.com.
Alfred Jarry was the proto-avant-garde shooting star par excellence and author of the Ubu plays.
The first in this trilogy, Ubu Roi (1896), is exemplar of Jarry’s absurdist mock-science, ‘pataphysics, which had an inestimable influence on the 20th- century’s avant-gardes.
‘Pataphysics can be roughly described as a science of imaginary answers to imaginary questions.
The formal, compositional gesture of both Goldsmith’s conceptualist writing and UbuWeb is ‘pataphysical.
His two lines of work just imagine different answers to the same imaginary question: what if copyright didn’t exist?